Author: Kris Murray, RSF Scientific Commitee member and associate Professor (Lead, Environment and Health) and “MRC Investigator” at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Fajara (Gambia)
- How would you define regeneration and what are some key aspects behind this concept?
Regeneration is a concept with a rich background, particularly in the field of ecology and conservation, which is where I come from. There is already a substantial body of literature on the subject in the area, as the fields of regeneration and conservation are interlinked (regeneration is one aspect of conservation). While conservation includes protecting and maintaining what already exists, regeneration focuses more specifically on restoring some of what has already been lost, and this often means taking more proactive interventions in the environment. In this area, regeneration is often about returning an ecosystem or population to its biological origin or its pre-degraded state. Such a ‘natural’ state is often regarded as having a greater ability to renew and recover itself from challenges / damage / perturbations (greater resilience) and then being enabled to be more self-sustaining.
A lot of the projects RSF focuses on seem to be focused on a specific facet of regeneration concerning natural resources, restoring the ecological value of a given area. Central to this topic is land use and land management — defining the purpose and function of a parcel of land or a certain amount of water, and what its role should be. This could be more clearly connected with concepts like sustainable agricultural intensification, which means transforming agricultural systems to be more attuned to and explicitly protecting the ecosystem services and functions on which they depend while also viably maintaining or even increasing production. This is a difficult balancing act that some people feel is a contradiction. For me, the critical aspect is understanding the threshold where activities genuinely become sustainable, which requires very clear specification of what sustainable actually means in terms of the conservation or regeneration of environmental values alongside preservation or pursuit of social values.
Naturally not all the projects of the various founders can be directly linked to ecosystem services, but generally something that remains true through all of them is the goal of minimising the impact. Companies that are extracting any type of resource from nature should be aware of how they are impacting what ultimately is a public good.
- What role do people play in managing regeneration, and how does that influence long-term sustainability?
People play a crucial role in managing regeneration efforts. We can’t take a completely hands-off approach; we need to help define what the restored state should look like, what is the aim and how does it fit into some carefully defined vision of being ‘sustainable’ or ‘regenerated’. Ecosystems have natural equilibrium points, but if you disrupt them, they can settle into new ones. If you want to restore an ecosystem to its original state, you have to account for this shift. In conservation, we often talk about concepts like ecological integrity, which refers to how close a system remains to its original state. But in some cases, it might not make sense to strive for a full return to that original condition and in contrast it may be a distraction or impractical to suggest that this is the goal.
A good example of this in practice is a project in The Gambia involving community forests. The Department of Forestry assigns the responsibility of managing and stewarding a piece of forest to a local community indefinitely, and in exchange they grant them access to some or all of the resources the forest produces. This sometimes means that new features are added to the forest, like introducing honey bees or some high value plant or tree, even when they were not originally part of that ecosystem. The idea is that this model is more sustainable (and perhaps cost effective) in the long term by balancing the needs of both people and the environment in which they live, making one the caretaker of the other. Making the forest more ‘useful’ for the community increases the incentive to protect it in the longer term, thereby improving the longevity of the restoration / protection efforts and the prospects of self-sustaining forest management. When people are directly involved in managing the land and see value in it, it strengthens the long-term sustainability of the project. Thus sometimes regenerating does not translate into perfectly restoring an ecosystem to its original state but it still may be a better outcome than an alternative (e.g., complete loss or degradation).
- How do you reconcile the conservation perspective of minimising damage and the regenerative perspective of changing an environment to regenerate it?
For a long time, perhaps due to my background in ecology and interests in wilderness and biodiversity, I was focused mostly on the idea of preventing loss, keeping ecosystems intact and minimising damage. I saw this as the highest priority. But now that I’m working more in the health space, I see these issues through a more pragmatic lens. An incremental approach in which it is possible to get some quick wins and essentially maximise the opportunity of grabbing “low-hanging fruits”, is sometimes preferable. Given how many habitats are completely and utterly degraded, even simple interventions that can kickstart the restoration of a piece of land from an ecological perspective have certain merits, and are definitely more achievable than starting out with a vision of full restoration.
Nature-based solutions, for example, aren’t always about bringing an ecosystem back to its former state of glory. Instead, they can focus on providing co-benefits alongside their main ambition of mitigating climate change / reducing GHG emissions, like supporting biodiversity while offering social, economic, or health benefits. It’s not always about restoring ecosystems to their original condition, but rather about creating resilient systems that can serve multiple purposes better than an alternative.
- Another big issue in the sphere of regeneration is measuring the impacts of projects and activities and avoid pitfalls
The issue of measuring regeneration (and impact of interventions more generally) remains a central one, it takes a lot of thought and resources to track any change in the natural world and have a robust understanding of the attributable impacts of a project. For example, I worked as a consultant for the natural resources sector in Australia, and there are naturally a lot of rules regulating what a company can and cannot do with respect to its activities with potential impacts on the environment. There may be, for example, no-go zones necessary to protect certain species, there may be regulations around returning the environment via some restoration works to its original state after the completion of the company’s activities, or companies may be permitted to ‘offset’ some impacts by agreeing to protect or restore other ‘equivalent’ environments. However, we need to be careful we’re getting what we expect or have been promised in terms of the benefits claimed. The status of the literature on offsetting, for instance, shows a certain lack of rigour in ensuring the impacts caused are genuinely offset and are equivalent to the particular harm done, and so there is room for such tools to be abused. It’s ultimately up to a regulator, a funder or perhaps a self-motivated company to accept and validate a chosen method claiming conservation, regeneration or sustainability according to some robust methodology that actually delivers what is intended or claimed.
Often, when impacts cannot be avoided or reversed, conservation science has turned towards optimization, trying to work out the best outcome for a given cost. This could mean comparing the potential approach of different projects to see how a certain amount of money could be used to have the biggest impact across multiple objectives or for multiple stakeholders.
- How do you see the intersection between biodiversity-driven restoration and the broader goals of climate change mitigation?
Restoration projects are often driven by biodiversity goals or cleaning up contaminated or degraded landscapes. One of the challenges we face is that climate change mitigation, i.e., focus on reducing emissions of GHGs, can sometimes come into conflict with biodiversity efforts or objectives.
An example of this potential conflict can be found in initiatives like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a global program to incentivise the protection of carbon reserves. Researchers noticed that although this program could lead to forest protection, it did not originally explicitly consider biodiversity and other values (e.g., communities livelihoods). Correcting this is what led to its extension, REDD+. The “plus” in REDD+ refers to the inclusion of biodiversity and ecosystem conservation (and potentially other values) alongside carbon sequestration goals.
Balancing these priorities—reducing emissions on one hand and preserving biodiversity and promoting co-benefits on the other—isn’t easy. But it’s a necessary conversation as we work to address both the climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity.
- How do you approach balancing competing priorities, like in fisheries or other environmental projects, to achieve multiple objectives?
Multicriteria decision-making plays a big role in balancing competing priorities. E.g., how can we optimally distribute fishing zones while satisfying both catch targets (for livelihoods) and area-based conservation criteria (for species protection)? There are many approaches (e.g., modelling) that can be used to try to explicitly minimise trade-offs between ecological, social and economic objectives, allowing for a more balanced approach and identifying the potential for more win-wins.
The key is finding solutions that don’t just focus on performing the best in one area but trying to find the solution to maximise the total available benefits, even if specific sectors are not strictly maximised. In the fisheries example, it could be about ensuring the long term sustainability / viability of fish stocks while also protecting ecosystems and meeting the needs of local communities (e.g., jobs) that rely on these resources. This kind of approach can point us in the right direction, and it’s something we can strive for when considering restoration and regeneration projects—solutions that aim for win-win outcomes rather than compromising one goal (e.g., safeguarding biodiversity) for the sake of another (e.g., near-term or single entity economic profits).
- What role does valuing ecosystem services play in restoration efforts, and how does the reduction of biodiversity impact these services?
Valuing ecosystem goods and services can be useful in trying to understand the broader impacts of some environmental impacts, such as deforestation or biodiversity loss. Over the years, various efforts have been made to try to quantify the economic value of ecosystem services more specifically and quantitatively —whether that’s carbon sequestration, water purification, or the prevention of soil erosion. These valuations require good data and rigorous methods to estimate and can help guide decision-making by making the costs and benefits of some intervention/impact more transparent or explicit, which could allow the trade-offs between sectors to be more apparent or at least better considered.
However, natural capital accounting (another term used to refer to valuing ecosystem goods and services) can miss important information, particularly where knowledge of certain processes or interdependencies in nature is poor or uncertainty is high. For instance, when biodiversity is reduced, you sometimes get unintended consequences that cannot be easily predicted or costed. In some cases, you can also observe feedback loops, where cause and effect become difficult to discern. An example of this is an apparent link between deforestation and infectious diseases. For instance, in parts of South America, forest clearance for agriculture can create conditions that are more favourable for malaria transmission, which then exacerbates public health issues. This adds stressors and cost to peoples lives and livelihoods and thereby encourages further deforestation. It’s a powerful illustration of how biodiversity loss can trigger a chain reaction, affecting not just ecosystems but also human health and livelihoods.
We’re still far from fully understanding the scale of these risks, but some studies are starting to try to quantify the potential for biodiversity loss to increase the risk of emerging infections or even pandemics. Biodiversity hotspots, which have immense conservation value, also act as reservoirs of future risks—both in terms of public health and environmental degradation. While there have been efforts to quantify these risks, we’re only scratching the surface of what’s needed to truly grasp the mechanisms and long-term implications of both landscape degrading and restoring interventions in such contexts.
Fortunately, it’s not always necessary to have a complete understanding to know whether something is a good or a bad idea. In the case of deforestation, while it may be particularly motivating for some people to act differently if they understood there could be a link to disease spillover or pandemic risk, there are a vast array of much better documented reasons to protect forests that go far beyond the anthropocentric view of the potential damage to human health.
Photo credits: Yu Wang